Fresh from winning a Pulitzer prize, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel The Sympathizer has landed the best first novel prize in the US’s top awards for crime fiction.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen review – a bold, artful debut

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About a half-Vietnamese, half-French communist spy in Los Angeles, The Sympathizer beat debuts including Jessica Knoll’s bestselling Luckiest Girl Alive to win the Edgar award for the best first novel by an American author on Thursday night. Last week, Nguyen’s novel won the Pulitzer, the top award in American fiction, praised as “a layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a ‘man of two minds’ - and two countries, Vietnam and the United States”.

On winning the Pulitzer, Nguyen posted on his website that “within minutes of getting it, I knew that I owed tremendous thanks to everyone who has gone before me in the great, ongoing struggle for social justice, for peace, for genuine equality, for representation for all at every level of every society.

“I think of the enormous debts I owe to everyone who fought for civil rights, for radical power, for economic equity, and how all these issues are inseparable from justice in the literary world. No minority writer, no writer of colour, can claim that he or she accomplished anything purely on their own merit. We all owe so much to the collective struggles and activists that preceded us, that laid the foundations for our individual achievement, to everyone lucky enough to be remembered and so many who have been forgotten,” he wrote.

Thursday’s Edgar awards, for the “best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television” from 2015, also saw Lori Roy’s Let Me Die in His Footsteps, inspired by the story of the last lawful public hanging in the US, win the best novel prize, and Stephen King’s Obits, from Bazaar of Bad Dreams, take the best short story award.

Traditionally, the Edgar awards judges do not elaborate on the reasons for their choices, but the Guardian’s review found that it was “a bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war and its interwoven private and public legacies”.

The grand master prize, marking “pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing”, went to Walter Mosley, whom the Edgars cited as “one of the most acclaimed and prolific crime writers of our time”, and “also the most successful and well-known crime writer of colour”.

When told of the honour last November, Mosley said that it was “the apex of my career as a crime writer; as a writer. It is, joyfully, one of the seminal events of my life.”